Relativity Sports is now running as an Independent.
Sports investor Ron Burkle has closed an investment in the former Relativity Sports, renamed it Independent Sports and Entertainment and hired former Madison Square Garden chief Hank Ratner as the company’s new president and CEO.
Burkle, co-owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, and his investment partners now have a more than 50 percent ownership stake in ISE.
“We are essentially relaunching the business as a new business,” Ratner said last week.
Andrew Sasson, a British-American entrepreneur, has made an investment in ISE and will be a member of its board, whose chairman will be Burkle. Ratner, too, is investing in ISE.
Also with equity states are senior sports agents Mark Pieper and Fernando Cuza, who head the baseball division; Dan Fegan, who heads the basketball division; and Roosevelt Barnes and Doug Hendrickson, who head the football division.
ISE will have its headquarters in New York, where Ratner is based. Fegan and some key ISE executives will be based in Los Angeles, which was headquarters for Relativity Sports. Pieper is based in Chicago and Cuza is based in Miami. Barnes is based in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Hendrickson is based in San Francisco.
The agency now represents more than 300 MLB, NFL and NBA players.
ISE is replacing Relativity Sports, which will no longer exist. It’s not clear how many clients Relativity Sports had.
Relativity Sports launched in the summer of 2013 in partnership with movie studio Relativity Media. Relativity Media will continue to hold a minority stake in ISE.
One reason for the name change is because there is no longer a close connection with Relativity Media. The former Relativity Sports shared office space with the movie studio but ISE is moving into a new space in Los Angeles and its new headquarters in New York.
Relativity Media recently emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Although Relativity Sports was a separate entity and never sought bankruptcy protection, the shadow of minority owner’s financial problems fell on the sports agency.
Burkle, his investment company Yucaipa Cos. and his partners owned 30 percent and Relativity Media owned 25 percent of the sports agency. But that was before Burkle closed a $30 million investment of new capital into the new company. The precise ownership stakes of all the groups and individuals in ISE could not be determined. ISE would not comment on ownership stakes.
“Independent Sports and Entertainment will include the best and the brightest talent in the industry representing some of the top names in sports,” Burkle said in a statement. He added that Ratner’s leadership will help “transform ISE into a leading sports, media, entertainment and management company.”
Ratner said the existing business of ISE provides a platform to expand into other sports in talent representation as well as other sports businesses, including content, social media and live events.
“What attracted me to this and what attracted Yucaipa to this is the potential to take this unbelievable platform that exists and this great group of agents who are already there and to grow the company in vertical and horizontal ways,” Ratner said.
Ratner has more than 30 years of experience in the sports, media and entertainment industries. He was president and CEO of the Madison Square Garden Co. from 2009 to 2014, and also held senior executive positions at Cablevision and AMC Networks.
Burkle and the Yucaipa Cos. have ownership stakes in entertainment assets around the world, including London-based Independent Talent Group, literary agency AGI Vigliano, and Artist Group International, a leading live event booking agency. Now that Burkle has significantly increased his stake in the sports agency, ISE is expected to take advantage of the synergies with Burkle’s other assets.
“We are going to assess and we are going to see areas we are going to move into,” Ratner said. “Some of them we can build ourselves, and some of them we can acquire and some of them may be in the family that we can connect together.”
